Book News: Dos Passos in the interwar years

John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years

BY AARON SHAHEEN AND ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO

University of Tennessee Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1621907138

https://utpress.org/title/john-dos-passos/

“I never could keep the world properly divided into gods and demons for very long,” wrote John Dos Passos, whose predilection toward nuance and tolerance brought him to see himself as a “chronicler”: a writer who might portray political situations and characters but would not deliberately lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. Privileging the tangible over the ideological, Dos Passos’s writing between the two World Wars reveals the enormous human costs of modern warfare and ensuing political upheavals.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This wide-ranging and engaging collection of essays explores the work of Dos Passos during a time that challenged writers to find new ways to understand and render the unfolding of history. Taking their foci from a variety of disciplines, including fashion, theater, and travel writing, the contributors extend the scholarship on Dos Passos beyond his best-known U.S.A. trilogy. Including scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the volume takes on such topics as how writers should position their labor in relation to that of blue-collar workers and how Dos Passos’s views of Europe changed from fascination to disillusionment. Examinations of the Modernist’s Adventures of a Young Man, Manhattan Transfer, and “The Republic of Honest Men” increase our understanding of the work of a complicated figure in American literature, set against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technology, growing religious skepticism, and political turmoil in the wake of World War I.

"John Dos Passos's Transatlantic Chronicling is a wide-ranging and engaging set of essays that extends and enriches the scholarship on Dos Passos. Welcome attention is given to Dos Passos’s travel writing, his work with theater, and the Iberian contexts so crucial for his artistic and political development. The collection also does justice to Dos Passos’s skills as a capacious chronicler of his time with pieces on how a diverse range of culture informed his writing—from clothes to burial practices to the contemporary cinema. A collection that decisively captures the wide sphere of interest of one of the key writers of left global modernism in the 1920s and 1930s."—Mark Whalan, Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English, University of Oregon 

"A trenchant and wide-ranging study of one of America's greatest authors. These essays trace the winding course of Dos Passos's writing and provide timely reflections on the functions of art in interesting times."—Wesley Beal, author of Networks of Modernism

“An essential addition to Dos Passos studies, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling expands one of the field’s central debates—the impact of the writer’s politics on his representations of history—into the 21st century with new critical perspectives. The multiplicity of voices and approaches in this volume illustrate the range of forms—innovative fiction, political and travel essays, experimental drama, memoir—in which he expressed the turbulent political, economic, and cultural transformations that propelled the US and the world into modernity.” —Lisa Nanney, author of John Dos Passos and Cinema and John Dos Passos Revisited, and co-editor of The Paintings and Drawings of John Dos Passos

AARON SHAHEEN is the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His books include Androgynous Democracy: Modern American Literature and the Dual-Sexed Body Politic and Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture.

ROSA MARÍA BAUTISTA-CORDERO is a professor of translation and interpretation in the Department of English Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is the author of the most recent Spanish-language annotated translation of Manhattan Transfer.

Book News: Opinion Polls in Interwar British Literature

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn

BY MEGAN FARAGHER 

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780192898975

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/public-opinion-polling-in-mid-century-british-literature-9780192898975?cc=us&lang=en&#

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when "psychography," a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new "material" turn so often associated with interwar writing.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Provides a cultural genealogy of public opinion polling in canonical and non-canonical literary works from the 1920s to the 1940s
• Demonstrates the propensity for sociologically inflected literature to flatten distinctions between high and low cultures by including experimental fiction, science fiction, detective fiction, and war fiction
• Presents the first history of polling as a cultural phenomenon as well as an institutionalized practice, which builds on growing interest in the complex relationship between modernism and institutionalism
• Adds to scholarly discussions of aesthetic transformation in the interwar period by introducing group psychology as a dominant cultural influence
• Integrates archival research from Home Intelligence Reports, Mass Observation Surveys, Wartime Social Survey Research, and BBC Listener Research Reports
• Provides interdisciplinary avenues for understanding changing cultural representations of psychological interiority that extend beyond literary modernism

Megan Faragher is an associate professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus. She received her PhD in English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012, where she specialized in twentieth-century English and Irish literature. She joined Wright State University Lake Campus in 2013 after completing a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at East Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture.

Book News: Environmental writing in the 1930s and 40s

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s

BY MATTHEW M. LAMBERT

UP of Mississippi, 2020

Hardcover : 9781496830401

Paperback : 9781496830418

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Green-Depression

Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and ’40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period’s literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests. ” Finally, they laid the groundwork for “environmental justice” by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and ’40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.

"Many of the important authors considered in this study—Nelson Algren, Tillie Olsen, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright, to name a few—have received insufficient attention from ecocritics, and yet, as Matthew M. Lambert shows in The Green Depression, their work and other writing during the Depression and the World War II eras is profoundly relevant to the roots of contemporary environmentalism that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. "

- Scott Slovic, coeditor of Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment

Matthew M. Lambert is assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Journal of Popular Film and Television.